Proponents were full of assurances as they took their dog-and-wheelchair show around the country back in the late 1980s: The proposed Americans with Disabilities Act wouldn\u2019t impose undue costs or hardships on businesses. It would simply require a few \u201creasonable accommodations.\u201d <\/p>\n
Widen a doorway here, provide a wheelchair ramp there — there weren\u2019t even likely to be many lawsuits. <\/p>\n
The ADA was enacted into law in 1990, and now approaches its 20th birthday. Let\u2019s just say compliance costs have turned out to be a bit higher than estimated; the \u201cnot many lawsuits\u201d promise was Dead on Arrival, and even after 18 years hardly anyone is able to agree on just what this law requires — even as the supporting political constituency known as \u201cthe disabled\u201d continues to grow by leaps and bounds. <\/p>\n
The Justice Department has just proposed adding 1,000 pages of new regulations to help \u201cclarify\u201d what the ADA requires, in America\u2019s ongoing efforts to provide equal access for \u201cthe disabled.\u201d <\/p>\n
But who are \u201cthe disabled\u201d? That \u201cprotected\u201d class long ago expanded beyond the deaf, the blind, and those who rely on wheelchairs. The Census Bureau now claims there are more than 51 million disabled Americans, representing 18 percent of the population. Does one in six of your fellow Americans look \u201cdisabled\u201d to you? <\/p>\n
Few can object to the original stated purpose of the Act. If a few inexpensive adaptations at the library or the bookstore can make it easier for a blind person or a person in a wheelchair to get around and participate in the nation\u2019s commerce, most Americans are happy to cooperate. <\/p>\n
But when there are government benefits available to anyone who can get their problem classified as a \u201clegal disability,\u201d it\u2019s no surprise lobbying pressure has been applied to get everything from alcoholism to depression to the inability to have sex qualified for a \u201cdisability\u201d check — and some special provision in the regulations. <\/p>\n
Imagine: a thousand pages of new regulations, obedience to which could cost 7 million affected businesses plus state and local government agencies $23 billion over the next 40 years, according to the Justice Department — which hasn\u2019t factored in the cost of defending against litigation from those who argue the new rules \u201cstill don\u2019t go far enough,\u201d of whom there are plenty. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a very mixed sense of what\u2019s happened,\u201d explains Curtis Decker, executive director of the National Disability Rights Network. \u201cThey left a lot of things unanswered.\u201d <\/p>\n
For instance, the new rules still don\u2019t do enough to address ticket fraud, information technology — such as check-in kiosks at hotels or airports — and closed-captioning at movie theaters, \u201cdisability advocates\u201d told The Associated Press last week. <\/p>\n
Oh goody. Run and tell the trial bar. <\/p>\n
In fact, I\u2019ll bet, right here and now, that there\u2019ll even be a lawsuit about the new \u201cservice animals\u201d provision: dogs are in, see; monkeys out. <\/p>\n
Among the millions of businesses and other public facilities that would be affected by the proposed regulatory changes? Courthouses, drinking fountains, amusement park rides, stadium and theater seating, fishing piers, boat slips, bowling lanes — even miniature golf courses, where 50 percent of the holes will now have to be accessible for players in wheelchairs, unaided by monkeys. <\/p>\n
(I am not, as Dave Barry used to say, making this up.) <\/p>\n
The rules supposedly apply only to new businesses and facilities and to alterations to existing ones. But existing businesses would also have to remove \u201creadily achievable\u201d barriers — changes that the bureaucrats figure won\u2019t require a lot of difficulty or expense — right away. <\/p>\n
There\u2019s also supposed to be a \u201csafe harbor\u201d provision that would hold small businesses have met their obligation to remove barriers in a given year if, in the preceding year, they spent at least 1 percent of their gross revenues on barrier removal. <\/p>\n
But the extremists don\u2019t like that. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe are worried about people claiming \u2018We did this, this and this, we renovated the bathroom on the second floor\u2019 but you still can\u2019t get in the three steps at the front door,\u201d complains Kleo King, senior vice president of accessibility services at the United Spinal Association. \u201cThere\u2019s too much room for abuse here.\u201d <\/p>\n
Note Ms. King has just applied the term \u201cabuse\u201d not to government regulators who have now generated another 1,000 pages of rules — rules of which \u201cignorance is no excuse\u201d — but rather to business owners and facility managers trying to hold proponents to their initial promise, all those years ago, that the ADA would require only \u201ca few reasonable, inexpensive accommodations.\u201d <\/p>\n
But why the concern? Businesses will actually profit from these new requirements, proponents argue, thanks to all the new income from handicapped customers. <\/p>\n
Yeah. And NASA paid back every penny of our taxpayer \u201cinvestment\u201d by giving us \u201cTang.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Proponents were full of assurances as they took their dog-and-wheelchair show around the country back in the late 1980s: The proposed Americans with Disabilities Act wouldn\u2019t impose undue costs or hardships on businesses. It would simply require a few \u201creasonable accommodations.\u201d Widen a doorway here, provide a wheelchair ramp there — there weren\u2019t even likely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[17,18,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-brother","category-economics","category-private-property"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-1w","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}